Grains

Forty-Four Grains of Virtue

1.
She,
of motive without history,
is beyond measure:
the more others impart,
the more she bestows until she is kin;
practiced,
able,
accomplished…
faith does not voice divine words unfailing.
2.
Forever seasoned without age,
countless allegations, however oblique,
bark and crow their artless plot:
their incantation… their honeyed custom;
their prattle
girdling mendacity in riddles.
Though, even in intent,
no-one fakes circumstance
to be flesh in its devotion.

3.
Her essence fulfils
the one task her life demands
and her so virtuous passion
remains distant yet immense.

4.
If words embody the present,
she once more embraces
the one now
dust’s passage is;
she again welcomes spoken wilderness
ahead of no-one and everyone…
nothing impenetrable
is nothing,
yet water is complete.

5.
Her hunger
is the moment
and she is silent:
she only has the present…
All but enough
diminishes what she conquers:
she, too, has
whatever resembles heaven.

6.
Beyond is delicate:
the fire, herein after,
is the intense awe
around the death of the parallel
life is.
She, meanwhile…

7.
Fragile is life,
is the way,
however insatiably sought
from this mouldering embrace.
When the meddling closes in,
the humble abandon the future
and the hungry replenish the moment.

8.
Her undying desire -
solely to escape the solitude
she, like you, as necessity, consumes -
is her blood and her shadow
should integrity, unaware,
muster the recollections you revere.

9.
Though twisted sour,
desire’s deceits kindle words
and she becomes everything pure.
She seduces,
yet she concedes
the journey is the wisdom
other cunning will reveal.
She will converge in parallel.

10.
Aspire to passion,
but understand, also, that this
is neither confession nor apprehension…
the moment
is what people approach
at the same season swell.

11.
Sentiment does this of belief:
it faces, if only in forethought,
what to value highest is variance.

12.
Integrity preserves her –
though in that rarely
so notably recognized amalgam
conceived as words from within…
no-one,
but insensate,
pains to pleasure.

13.
Heart-heavy with time,
she will surmount the new
where the supposèd tragedy is there
without chaos,
without course;
this sway
a refuge,
an impetus
even I affirm is there between…

14.
Pleasure comes
to make the struggle life is
confess purpose.
She sees
she who is laughing
knows she who is happy
to see all.

15.
Devotion protects her aspirations:
it has reticence in fidelity,
has certainty that, still without
order throughout, yearns for fullness
to be the liberty to dare to love…
the meanings have grown obsolete
in speaking of ritual that says all.

16.
The end
does not complete her journey
through the successive pain and place
she lives.
Her foremost obsession
puts her above sentiment…
she is the wisdom of the seas and rivers.

17.
The end
is unseen spirit,
hidden to forever lead
these misunderstandings
through the weight of knowing,
through the heaviness
she becomes in the unknowing,
the enlightening way,
to submit to age.

18.
Appear to resist
and she declares the endless drift
to be nothingness,
as much as the reflection it always seeks.
Nothing surrenders,
nothing decays:
thus, she follows a course
constructed from a delusive consonance;
still easily shattered, though stubborn;
easily found, yet not seized.

19.
Meandering, as if
many words make her whole,
she is still what time finds possessed -
essence within deed.

20.
The tide is calm;
she awaits the nothingness
between the words you cherish.

21.
Each scream
is another province… is the brief moment
beyond when
its stillness
becomes vast;
a symmetry unbroken.

22.
In shared time…
disparate strides,
corresponding spirits;
solitary spectres
who crowd the silent progress
toward the answers you, the led,
must utter.

23.
And being the motive, the journey
is this eternal act of allusion you pursue;
the occupying of boundaries
no-one knows,
no-one lifts.
You exist everywhere
through being the departing season,
through speaking ancient truths.
You can only prove
emptiness is beyond heaven to men.

24.
Blind without colour, she is thirsty:
she imagines she is
tangible delusion and superstition
biting into the one happiness
only sadness relieves.

25.
Innocent cravings
have, themselves, become
the ignorance we untangle
in the stillness of time;
the hollowness we voice… the ominous art people destroy.
And, impoverished, you are there;
the world,
the present,
the way this belief
must expose the duplicity you allege.

26.
Promising fathomless patience,
she is stirred
by motionless circumstance,
affected by devotion she cannot pursue.
Secret thoughts snarled
and mouth crowded,
she knows who…

27.
To end this descent
is to give life to posterity;
to know peace.
Its every grain awakens
blood, sinews, bones,
with poisonous intent unperturbed.

28.
I sense your hope
will become her promise.
She,
who truth moulds,
will not be betrayed.

29.
Virtue, not chaos, decides
where confines clear a stride,
where icon and poet are only empty retreats,
where weeds are royalty,
where all above is to know really if…

30.
Always this specific clarity to return to -
your caress reveals
the belief in doubts
her life answers to:
she, who is that beginning, has bounds.

31.
Undiminished,
sorrows become cast
without precious life being
solely so flawless.
Circumstances nourish direction.

32.
Transient, she is why emptiness
finds its path through the past,
as far as time and reason permit:
and, throughout, she breathes
this virtuous future-thread from within,
of life, of stillness, of death –
of coming without going.

33.
Childlike,
her quiet loyalty
is true to the essence her heart weaves.

34.
The swarming
of unfettered remains attained
she lulls and, all the time, drains:
she,
the vitreous evermore;
she,
this unity.

35.
…and anything she is
she knows she becomes -
wisdom the way the cycle endures.

36.
Enough is the yearning
greater than sorrow -
there are
pleasures to exhaust.

37.
Stillness and purity
subdue asinine spiralling
as its progress becomes
its boundless perfection.

38.
Pain and chance become
to acknowledge
she is who the delusion
inevitably embraces:
she,
who attempts truths;
she,
who is one.

39.
Dust is deed in flesh…
the words, without explanation,
voice the adoration you persuade
even unfailing creation
to deny.

40.
My going will encourage others
further through waning truths
for themselves;
these gods, yet,
what symmetry grants,
flowing towards their dusk,
sure all things spawn you…
the way.

41.
Perfect virtue is the solitary moment
no voice has the resonance,
the pure essence,
to aspire to be life
as appears to the muse.
Though, at that moment, loudly,
she laughs, while the doubts she hears
surrender to habit with wisdom assumed.

42.
Emptiness comes:
heaven is the surrender.

43.
The encumbrance of hope is exiled:
its root, in the epithet
this unbroken scream holds so foul,
has reason to have had itself silenced;
not to whisper the truth this path became.
And you,
the virtuous apparition,
came, clarified all
and offered the quiet euphony
you absorbed beyond the clutches of bedlam.

44.
Throughout the pretending
persists the haste of dawn
and the chaos of dawning…
The belief in emptiness
is her grain, her answer –
and she cherishes love and life:
nurtures being;
forever treasures silence.

More Grains

"There is still so much of life
that fails to make sense."

1.
Itself,
silence creates hunger
without being,
bequeathing clarity
I take to carve,
all, if not nothing,
and journeying without end.

2.
Risking distant angles,
the fragments appear connected,
absorbed in communion
with the entirety life achieves.
The uncertain history
becomes invisible,
transparent.
Life is this now
you take to adorn,
to allow to grow,
to need to want.
You unravel
until virtue
befriends you.

3.
Stop
and nothing
you listen for
arrives.
Stop
and only silence
comes to mirror
the eternal embrace.

4.
Belief completes the knowing -
without it,
forever is as being;
it is the when the spirit seizes,
the dead the inexhaustible revere.

5.
Death,
not time,
is sufficient awareness
to recognise effortless faith.

6.
Beyond the solitary path of words
flows the fate never knows,
if, where life finds only beginnings,
all truth would cast off its mould.
The indispensable
is simplicity;
is infinite.

7.
A moment in cloudless time stirs
with the song of unfolding beliefs
only impressions of stillness allow.
Alone,
the thought of seeing
the ungodly reality of whim
appears uncommon
when the coincidence of purity
is the struggle of art,
of life.
In man,
I exist,
intact,
to tell.

8.
From
scattered sense
swelling doubt
accompanies the years
and, where actions
encourage convention,
the rape of stillness
stains innocence within.

9.
Too often cruel is the present
to dilute time,
now circumstances hold to poverty.
It consumes,
it manipulates certainty,
laying open a world more sweated.

10.
Gathering for necessity,
no serious future
follows the sequence it rehearses.
If there is simplicity,
life is the sorrow
invented to return with purity.
Wisdom, once still, spins
and the cadence is surrender -
the loss is of sense.

11.
This imperfection in meaning
hastens the delusive significance
of clarity in life:
there for forever to know;
always the imminent knot
in what no-one needs.
Never brief, being has no end.

12.
Sense loses all direction
through absorbing
the world of forsaken eyes,
foregoing purpose
when, even without flesh,
motion is unmoving.

13.
To alter heaven
is to entice time
and sully stillness;
to always echo
the words of doubt
diversity weaves.
Alone, so silent,
there is dust and air
already complete, invariably one.

14.
These, with chaos,
cause all coincidence,
stumbling, like inspired bravado,
to become hunger, to long for life,
to seek passage beyond beliefs.

15.
Belief is only enough
where you face those
you suppose elated.
You come upon them
with one assumption:
you will achieve,
in them,
in one life,
sense that can endure
heaven and earth.
Yet, day does not settle into words.

16.
In life,
every phrase
is laden with ancient woes,
with pains within knots
to become fire,
to set the circle of being.
The path taken
shall grow old,
full of empty virtue.

17.
Through unmistakable
moments of intuition,
I begin to balance
names without time
against the ambiguous silence
words obscure
and, so, make being of knowing.

18.
The question to ponder,
(like all unceasing seas)
only I perceive,
so luminous, so chaotic,
as if impatient to belong,
yet given wholly to lifting
the last loneliness there is between.

19.
Sorrows become you, as
to embrace, to hold to
something that is divine,
something within,
and put love before virtue,
place knowing beyond faith,
beyond words.

20.
There are times
when conscience
will purify shared blood,
when embellishment
will conceal untold sense
and when passion
will silence unblemished belief.

21.
Free, we imagine
every moment must bear happiness -
comfortable and familiar,
the entire sky cloudless.

22.
In life,
time leads to awareness of ending,
as if to stumble alone, dying.
Sense only suggests forever,
hints at the motive all things return to.
I, accordingly,
will the stillness towards birth.

23.
And what can flow, little by little,
can come closer to the unknown;
the impenetrable expanse
that crowds in,
like faltering pain,
from within.
But
that the invisible unravels time
sacrifices forgotten sense.

24.
Unrelenting,
this one naked insight dissolves:
its reason it seals in objectless form;
once more,
without speaking
of the unlit dawn.
Its ritual is its gravity -
its belief, its vision.

25.
Distance may separate
the passions blood considers sense,
if I last this suffering, as is meant,
but it is beauty, inasmuch as
this suffering is complete.

26.
And the eye’s pain
grinds the chaos raw;
mad hearts following,
flowing wild:
the stubborn poetry
witnesses blind.

27.
Life answers
what time serves to diminish.
Each nothingness
shapes the emptiness
togetherness holds,
senseless in emphasis.

28.
Life is this…
pressing and swelling,
sustaining and subsisting,
recollecting and spawning,
feasting and forming:
yet, without clarity,
everything you have
can remain redundant,
to become so shrouded
you abandon your soul.

29.
This time is when pain
lingers in words
as scattered as faith can be
and in habit
as ancient as certainty
is something to hold to.

30.
Remorse remains
to reveal compassion,
stirring within, while delusions
unveil silence demanding truth,
in itself offering depth
to explain thinking without being.
All is water - the tide is faith.

31.
Language is as nothing
without seeking solitude,
and is merely hollow
in forever being not.
Anticipated,
yet timeless…
age and peace.

32.
Pain without sharing is permitted
and bliss, as motive,
is the gateway taken to being.

33.
Within the sanctuary of sparse words,
poetry emerges, more and more,
and is dust without breath for fortune.
Like delaying, the sacrifice persists,
common to creation and distance.

34.
It is tangible,
yet it dissolves…
it scatters all wisdom
to not ever and always.

35.
Through everything
hereafter and ending,
circumstance
breathes in sense
that yields only bones
and reduces hearts
to snarled emotions.
Dust brings truths
that bring truths
that bring perfect purity of faith.

36.
…except time
is when nothing concedes
and stillness is abandoned,
silent to all in sorrow and sense,
yet complete, already as if now
is that moment of intangible faith.

37.
Throughout the conundrum,
the hidden epithet
is simply one of sense,
of vision:
the nothingness
close to unfolding.
…and wakening,
I call the name of another:
the eternal…
the sweated whisper of beyond.

forty-four grains of virtue and
more grains recycle both sections
of the tao te ching by employing
a reverse-order diction generation
process which is then synonymically
manipulated using single-sitting
constructionist techniques.
forty-four grains was originally published
in 1998 by Raunchland as a limited
edition chapbook.